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"We're . . . modern-day lepers"

Elizabeth Bennett, left, and Sara Luther look over some of the many African items they collect and sell. As a gay Christian, Bennett says she is trying "to create discussion and change."
(Helen H. Richardson, The Denver Post
)

Elizabeth Bennett sits in her Denver church contemplating the elephant in the sanctuary that few polite Episcopalians want to mention.

Bennett grew up in the Episcopal church. She sang in the choir. She was married in one and baptized her five children there. Her mother's ashes are buried under a tree outside an Episcopal church in Massachusetts.

But being openly gay now in the Colorado diocese, she says, is like being given "half-a-loaf acceptance."

Gays are offered some sacraments but not others.

"I've gotten mine. But this is wrong — to go to church, have potlucks and not care about other people's rights," said Bennett, 59.

And, she said, the pain of partial acceptance is the pain of rejection.

"There are places in our lives where we truly want to be loved," Bennett said.

The church's hope is that a moratorium on blessing gay unions and ordaining openly gay priests — "passionate patience" — will help hold the fracturing American church together and keep it part of the larger, less liberal international Anglican Communion.

Woman out of patience

Bennett said she is out of patience, yet most Christian gays enjoy even less acceptance in their churches.

Fundamentalist Christians believe the Bible condemns homosexuality — and preach loving the sinner but never the sin.

The official catechism of the Roman Catholic Church teaches "homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered, contrary to the natural law" and calls "homosexual persons to chastity.

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Some Christian gays wonder whether their faith is strong enough to endure the rejection — or whether they're spiritual masochists.

"We're more modern-day lepers than martyrs," said Scott Pomfret, author of "Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir."

"Why do we remain in this Church with whom we have so many fundamental difficulties and with which we experience so many disappointments and frustrations," said Pomfret, 40.

He said he suspects his faith is deeper than words.

Last month, after his memoir came out, Pomfret's Boston church removed him from several lay leadership posts he had held.

The parish's Franciscan friars had always known he was gay and an author of gay romance novels, Pomfret said, but the memoir made everything too public.

Religious voices — not God or the Bible — have screamed the loudest against the full inclusion in society of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, said United Church of Christ Minister Candace Chellew-Hodge, founder of Whosoever, the online magazine for GLBT Christians.

"Some who call themselves gay Christians may be truly deceived into accepting it; others might be in simple rebellion," Dallas said. "What compels them to believe a lie we cannot say. What we can say is that they are wrong — dead wrong."

The church has a long history of getting things wrong and inflicting suffering, said Joe Quillen, a 59-year-old gay evangelical Christian raised in a large Southern Baptist congregation in Dallas.

He still attends an evangelical Christian church in Denver.

Being gay not "a choice"

"Ever since I was a kid, my faith has always been something very real to me. I was never willing to sacrifice my faith for my sexuality," Quillen said.

"But I also can't deny this God-given desire. I never questioned whether being gay was a choice. It was not."

Quillen believes it's all about rights.

"The church is essentially saying gay people shouldn't exist," Quillen said. "The religious right refuses to admit that homosexuality is an innate characteristic rather than a behavioral choice. That's because civil rights are bestowed on people for innate characteristics — race, gender, age — and not for personal choices."

Bennett presented a resolution at her congregation's annual meeting. She has written to the diocese. She talks about "the elephant" — gay rights — at church, at coffee hour, in committees and at adult-education classes.

"I am trying in my very limited-opportunity way to create discussion and change," Bennett said. "You can't say a person can have one sacrament but not the other. We are either all children of God or we're not."

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